Dyslexia is my friend

It all started with World of Warcraft. Silly, eh? It seems that several recent real life adventures started as a result of the on-line game World of Warcraft. In this episode, our adventureres headed to Best Buy so that Doug could buy a mouse to better play WoW on his laptop. While wandering around, looking for open box sepcials and holiday price leaders, Doug checked out the gigabit ethernet switches, as he has during every trip to a geek store over the past few months. His eyes fell upon the NetGear GS105 five port 10/100/1000 switch. The gasp came as he read the price: $19.99. We had the price checked. Then the inventory. Only one in the store. Then the inventory of nearby stores. Thus began the oddessy. You see, with a price like that a single five port switch just wasn't going to do it. So, after determining the nearest store with more inventory we headed out. The second store had three, so Doug bought one and I bought two; so we now both had two. Two works great for me, I can chain them together and essentially have an eight port gigabit switch for $40. Not bad, eh? Doug is the decadent one. He's using one at home and tossing the other in his laptop bag in case he ever needs a portable gigabit switch...

But it couldn't end there, could it?

We had to know if this was a fluke, or if the price had just really dropped that far. CompLuser has the same switch for $91.99 Circuit City has if for $98. PriceGrabber shows the cheapest price at $74, and they are selling on eBay for $55. Best guess? Someone at Best Buy pulled a dyslexic typo on a $91.99 price, and we scored. So by now we are thinking of things we could do with them. Stocking stuffers for friends, selling them on eBay, etc. We just need more. We tell Bass what we are up to and he wants in. While Nan, Mel and I were spending some veg time in the living room Doug was in my office calling around. The next nearest Best Buy was out of stock. The next one had 'a bunch'. It's 9:15, this particular Best Buy is about 40 minutes away... We do what any hard core geeks would be expected to do... We hauled ass.

Apparently 'a bunch' is now defined as two. We do another inventory check, expanding our search pattern. The St. Pete Best Buy has two in stock, and Ft. Meyers has five. Even selling them on eBay the return on the effort is starting to lose its shine. We buy what we have and head back to Haus Boheme. We now have six Netgear GS105 switches for a little more than one would normally cost.

I think Doug got the mouse. I hope it's the right one. Otherwise, we might be driving to Ft. Meyers to return it...